Anshul Roy’s Rage Against the Archive critically examines the 19th-century ethnographic book The People of India in the New York Public Library’s digital archives.  

For this Screen Walk, he built upon this to explore how the phenomenon of Orientalist imagery has evolved since “the other” gained more control over their representation. Has this shift led to more nuanced visual documentation of regions like India, or has it merely amplified the Colonial Gaze?  

Roy examined the proliferation of Instagram images from within India, focusing on photographic activity taking place in key locations like Pushkar Mela and Varanasi. He traced the genealogy of ethnographic photography in India and its transformation into contemporary self-Orientalism on Instagram, where the Colonial Gaze is now perpetuated by Indians themselves. 

Biography

Anshul Roy (b. 1997, India) is a visual artist with an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY. In 2020, he received a B.Tech in Bioengineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, where he became interested in the intersection of STEM and Arts and how these diverse knowledge systems could merge. Roy’s current artistic practice is inspired by Postcolonial discourses, exploring issues like identity, historical memory, cultural representation, and visual ethics. He is particularly interested in probing how British colonisers employed photography in India for “othering” and visual propaganda, and how these ethnographic photos exist in our contemporary institutional archives.

Roy’s work has been exhibited in prestigious venues like the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, where he received the “Best in Show” award in 2024 for his project Rage Against the Archive. He has also shown his work at places such as the Art Gallery of Peterborough (Ontario, Canada), IEEE VIS Arts Program (St. Pete Beach, FL), :iidrr Gallery (Manhattan, NY), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, UK), Society for Photographic Education’s Media Festival (St. Louis, MO) and the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Film & Media Festival (Tampa, FL).